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Earlier this year, our Deputy CEO Sarah Johnson was selected to attend the International Publishers Association Congress in Kulala Lumpur with a group of delegates from the British Council. In today’s guest post, she reflects on the experience which offered a valuable opportunity to network with the international publishing community.

Publishing Futures: 7 Inspiring Days in Kuala Lumpur

In July 2026, I was fortunate enough to be selected by the British Council as one of only three publishers from the UK to attend the International Publishers Association Congress in Kuala Lumpur. I’ll be honest, I nearly didn’t apply, struck for a moment by the ridiculous notion that I was too busy to go and couldn’t possibly spare the time. But then the email came through telling me I’d been selected – far from being the long shot I’d initially thought, I’d been given an opportunity, and I was determined to make the most of it.

I’ve always relished the chance to learn new things, especially when it relates to books or publishing. There’s nothing better than coming together with other likeminded individuals to talk about what we love, and the work we put in day in day out to produce books which motivate, engage and inspire readers. Not only that, I was looking forward to representing Welsh publishing on the international stage.

What stands out when I think back on this trip, is the interesting, varied and passionate discussions I had with everyone I met. On day one, the British Council group, made up of publishers from the UK, Malaysia and Indonesia, came together to talk about our markets and the challenges and opportunities we confront on a daily basis. As well as offering my first introduction to South East Asian markets, these sessions shifted my perspective on the UK industry, particularly when thinking about freedom to publish and the nuances of censorship. At the same time, it was comforting to be reminded of our many shared experiences, with each of us battling issues such as cash flow, low retail price ceilings and increased production costs. The open discussions we engaged in on this day set the tone for the rest of the programme.

Before the IPA Congress officially began, we were invited to join a bookshop tour. The first stop was Raja Tun Uda Library (Selangor State Public Library), an inviting, state-of-the-art facility embedded in the local community with spaces that encouraged creative expression, skills development and improved access to books. Later in the day we visited The Library by BookXcess, and I was fortunate to meet the founder, Andrew Yap, that evening who explained the concept behind the store which sells predominantly remainder stock. Designed to appeal to everyone, not only ‘book readers’, it hosts a café, a fashion store, a bakery and operates as a 24/7 library for students at Sunway University. Users of this multi-functional space are surrounded by books which are on offer at affordable prices, and often, they buy one before they leave.

This subtle shift in mind-set sends a powerful message to the industry; one picked up in talks during the IPA Congress in the following days. ‘As an industry, we’re very good at talking to avid readers’ said Anna Burkley, CEO of Australia Reads in a session on Reading Habits. ‘We need to get better at marketing to everyone else’. How else are we going to combat the decline in reading for pleasure?

One of the sessions I found most inspiring was Adibah Omar’s talk on Building National Reading Infrastructure. As CEO of Malaysia’s Book City Corporation, she works closely with the Malaysian Government, publishers and the wider book industry to improve access to books for readers of all ages. This includes offering vouchers to school children to spend on any book they want and investing in technology that supports readers of Braille. She talked about knowledge as infrastructure; something vital to society which travels further than privilege. Creating readers through better access, creates markets – this is not a revolutionary idea, but it’s one that’s easily overlooked within the daily grind. I hope to continue this conversation now that the congress has ended.

In his closing keynote, Markus Dohle encouraged us to be more positive as an industry. We’d talked a lot about what threatens us – AI, the global decline in literacy levels – but he reminded us that we’ve faced seemingly insurmountable challenges before and have emerged stronger. Perhaps this is why I came away from this trip feeling ultimately hopeful. My fellow delegates and I were selected to be there, in part, because we represent the future of our industry. These threats, and their solutions, will undoubtedly impact our careers, so what are we going to do about it?

I don’t have the answer right now, but I’m determined to use everything I learned to make a positive impact. And in the meantime, here’s what I’ll be reminding myself more often:

• Never be afraid to go for the opportunity – someone has to be chosen, why not you?
• Networking with others who share your passion is never as hard as you think!
• Creating more readers is vital to the future of our industry.
• Remember to look up once in a while and remind yourself that the work you’re doing and the books you help produce, have the power to change lives.

Sarah Johnson
Deputy CEO & Head of Marketing & Sales

Maggie Harris continues her winning streak having been announced as the winner of the 2025 Poetry Award in the Guyana Prize for Literature, announced during a ceremony at the 2026 Guyana Prize Literary Festival.

The jury of the poetry category hailed Maggie’s winning collection I Sing to the Greenhearts as an “…accomplished and enchanting collection of deeply lived and deeply felt poems [that] reflects on the poet’s connections to Guyana both as a place of memory and of contemporary encounter with tender knowingness and an extraordinary authenticity of voice”.

The news comes weeks after Maggie was crowned winner of the Jhalak Poetry Prize. Her award-winning collection is available here on our website and from your local bookshop.

In this guest post, Eoghan Walls reflects on the process of writing his new poetry collection Elsa and the Wolfman, which explores the profound, playful bond between father and daughter.

Writing Elsa & The Wolfman, A Wild Fling of Empathy

We had kids in our early thirties. Two beautiful hectic girls. Bare foot, on beaches. Jam sandwiches and broken glass. Laughter, anxiety. Braiding everything. The house rustled with drawings.

Then – although we were not trying – a series of sad miscarriages.

As a third child, I had a superstitious hankering for a third child. But the miscarriages were painful and we grew cautious and did not expect any more children.

Then, in our forties, my wife told me she was pregnant again. We went to the ultrasound, expecting a blank screen and sorrow, and were overwhelmed to see a small moon face bobbing at the window.

I have written about fatherhood and daughters in all my books. I loved reading Antony Joseph on his own dad and Jack Underwood about tremulous expectation and Phillip Gross about the pain of fatherhood. Hannah Lowe on living with a child, Sharon Olds on her father. But there is so much of my own experience of fatherhood I have not seen echoed in other writers.

For example, how breastfeeding fills me with awe. My wife could transform pain and dryness into deep silent breathiness, a physical calm, sitting on our bed with the curtains half drawn or on a bench in a train station. I would watch from the doorway, or stood by the yellow line, like a shepherd at a manger before the dark mammalian peace they shared, a power I lacked. My awe was a braid of envy, of wonder, of alienation.

Or pain. When my child got hurt – nettles or concrete mostly, some horrible sicknesses also – their eyes would blame me; but often, I was the only source of comfort near. So they would reach to be lifted and soothed, knowing I was the villain, too slow, too inattentive or incompetent to have prevented harm. The wet swirl in their eyes –recrimination actively quashed in the need for comfort – felt like an awful summons.

In my thirties, with my first kids, I was a University adjunct. I got two days unpaid paternity leave with my eldest two daughters. I tried to be a good dad – like to think I was – using my tenuous work schedule to spend time with the kids – but a life on tenuous wages means you are always looking over your shoulder for financial stability.

In my forties, with the new daughter, I got fourteen weeks paternity leave at full pay. It was a transformational blessing.

I could be at peace, take time off work, just me and the kid.

We played endlessly. First mostly with blocks or spoons. Washed carrots. Eventually, she became Elsa, spraying ice on everything. I became the Wolfman, a villain, constantly stealing food from her plate or her dolls’ plates.

I didn’t want my new poems to be just the voice of the Wolfman. I wanted to give Elsa a voice too, write Elsa poems. Of course I was afraid of appropriation here. But for fourteen weeks, that bled into covid, where no-one had childcare, where kids were always there, me and Elsa were as close as two beings could be. When she wasn’t strapped to me in a green canvas sling, I was feeding her. If not on my shoulders, she bounced on my knee as I typed. The Elsa poems here – child poems, falling disobedient and wild across the page – aren’t only my newest daughter. The poems are of course a braid of experiences, include my elder daughters, my own childhood, my experience of being an animal in the world too.

But – for a while at least – me and all my daughters existed as close as humans can be. Maybe not as close as a mother is – that’s fair. But close enough, I hope, that a wild fling of empathy might have the raw tune of truth about it.

Eoghan Walls

We are delighted to announce that Laura Wainwright won the Wales Book of the Year English-language Poetry Award 2026 for her remarkable debut, The Storm’s Flora.

Laura’s collection is a powerful exploration of resilience in the face of ecological and human crises. Here, new life emerges from darkness and turmoil, and flourishes despite it. These poems offer awe-inspiring observations of the natural world rooted in the language, landscapes and histories of Wales. Told with musicality and an artist’s eye for detail, The Storm’s Flora celebrates the earth’s vivid beauty with flair and ingenuity.

Our Poetry Co-editor Zoë Brigley commented: “Laura’s poetry has long been admired in Wales and it is no surprise to me that her first book is a smash. Having already been shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize and now winning the poetry category of Wales Book of the Year, Laura is just getting started and we cannot wait to see what she does next.” 

Administered by Literature Wales, Wales Book of the Year champions inspiring literary talent from Wales in both English and Welsh. In both languages, prizes are awarded in four categories – Poetry, Fiction, Creative Non-Fiction and Children & Young People – with one of the four category winners in each language announced as overall winners, claiming the title of Wales Book of the Year / Llyfr y Flwyddyn. This year the overall awards went to Anthony Shapland for his debut novel, A Room Above a Shop (Granta) and Mererid Hopwood for her poetry collection Mae (Cyhoeddiadau Barddas).

The full list of winners from all categories in both languages can be found on the Literature Wales website. 

You may have noticed changes here at Seren Books over the past few years. With the help of the many individuals and organisations we work with, we reflected on what kind of publisher we wanted to be and what it would take to get us there.

We want to publish literature which influences and reflects the complexities and realities of lives in contemporary Wales and the wider world. This has meant more proactively curating our lists and the creatives we work with to reach a broader readership. It has also meant scrutinising how we work, to make the greatest impact we can culturally, economically and for the publishing eco-system we operate within. So, to celebrate how far we’ve come since 2025, we’re sharing some of our key successes below.

Thank you to everyone who has supported us on our journey so far. We hope you’ll join us as we carry on!

We’re delighted to share that Bethany Handley has won an Eric Gregory Award for her poetry pamphlet Cling Film, a prize awarded to outstanding collections by poets under 30.

Bethany is one of five 2026 winners for the prize which is administered by the Society of Authors. The awards were founded in 1960 by the late Dr Eric Gregory for the encouragement of young poets.

Speaking on this year’s winners, judge Jasmine Gardosi said: ‘Judging the Eric Gregory Awards this year has both sent me to other worlds and pulled me deeper into this one. We have read voices that range from snappy and lucid, to sparse and desolate, to mystical and fae-like in its lyricism. What has been consistent is the ability of each winner to make me pause at a line, to take a break in the middle of a poem, to mutter “wow” under my breath. I have been impressed by the risk-taking, the world-building, and the deftness with which these writers have done two things, at the same time: tell a story through their collection, and also hit the mark with each of their poems. Whether it be on trauma, on truth, on family, freedom, or loneliness – the writing of every single winner has hacked into my mind, and changed it.’

You can view the full list of winners on the Society of Authors website here.

Photo by Adrian Pope.

Earlier this week, the winners of the 2026 Jhalak Prize Awards were announced, in which Maggie Harris was named winner of the Jhalak Poetry Prize for her collection I Sing to the Greenhearts.

Celebrating books by writers of colour in the UK and Ireland, the Jhalak Prize Awards celebrated their 10th anniversary at the ceremony which was held at the Hachette UK Headquarters. Maggie is only the second winner of the Jhalak Poetry Prize which was added in 2024. This year’s judges for the poetry prize were Romalyn Ante, Nikita Gill and Kadija (George) Sesay.

Of Maggie’s collection, Nikita Gill said: “Maggie Harris uses her powerful skills of reflection, craft and cadence to give us one of the most incisive, magical poetry collections of the decade.”

Seren Books poetry co-editors Zoë Brigley and Rhian Edwards add: “This vivid, powerful collection deserves this recognition. Where else but in Maggie Harris’ poems will we find a banana reading Louise Bennett’s ‘Colonisation in Reverse,’ or see Fanny Eaton, the Pre-Raphaelite Jamaican muse, step out of a painting and into her own power? We’re proud to have published it and of Maggie’s connection to Wales.” 

I Sing to the Greenhearts is available in bookshops nationwide and here on our website.

Congratulations to Laura Wainwright whose debut poetry collection The Storm’s Flora is on the shortlist for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize 2026.

Judged by Leontia Flynn, Nick Laird and Karen Solie she’s one of 5 shortlistees alongside Isabell Baafi, Dean Browne, Sasha Debvec-McKenny and Catherine-Esther Cowie. Speaking about this year’s prize, Leonita Flynn said: “As the world continues to experience political turbulence, The Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize allows us to get back in touch with the careful attention to language by which we might reset it.”

The winner will be announced during the Seamus Heaney Centre’s annual Poetry Summer School, at the Award Night readings in June 2026.

Our poets are on fire this year and we’re keeping our fingers crossed for all of them!

Congratulations to Deryn Rees-Jones and Laura Wainwright who have both been shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2026 in the Poetry Category alongside Jeremy Over (Carcanet).

Deryn is shortlisted for her collection Hôtel Amour – a sequel to her previous collection Erato (also shortlisted in 2020) –which explores the complexities of memory and memorialisation, desire and the body and poetry’s place in a hostile world. Laura is shortlisted for her debut collection The Storm’s Flora, a powerful exploration of resilience in the face of ecological and human crises.

The full shortlists for the Welsh and English awards were announced on Sunday 10 May. This year’s judges for the English-language award are Zoë Skoulding, Catrin Kean, Shirish Kulkarni and Julie Golden. Speaking about the shortlist, Zoë said: “It was exhilarating to read such wonderful writing across all the categories, and painfully difficult to narrow the choice down to our final selection. We had to keep asking ourselves what makes an extraordinary book – and this is a question with as many answers as there are readers.”

Voting is now open for the People’s Choice Award where readers can vote for their favourite books on the shortlist. You can give Deryn and Laura your support by voting on the Nation.Cymru website.

The winners in each category and the two overall winners of Wales Book of the Year in Welsh and English will be announced at the award ceremony at Galeri in Carnarfon on Thursday 9 July. You can find out more about the prize and the full shortlists on the Literature Wales website.

We’re excited to share that Maggie Harris’ latest poetry collection I Sing to the Greenhearts is shortlisted for the Jhalak Poetry Prize 2026.

Haunted by ghosts of colonial history, Maggie’s wise and insightful collection offers a world where both ecological crisis and justice are at stake, where wildness, memory, migration and the unsettling power of place converge, and the untamed boundaries of nature nourish, disrupt and always challenge.

The Jhalak Prize awards celebrate books by writers of colour in the UK and Ireland. Supported by Ink Sweat & Tears, The Jhalak Poetry Prize was first added to the awards portfolio in 2024 and sits alongside the Jhalak Prose Prize and Jhalak Children’s & YA Prize. The 2026 Poetry Prize judges are poets Romalyn  Ante, Nikita Gill and Kadija (George) Sesay.

Jacob Ross, the first ever Jhalak Prize winner (and judge this year) described each book on the 2026 Jhalak Prize longlists as a powerful act of creative resistance. Speaking on the awards as a whole, prize director, Sunny Singh commented, “The past decade of the Jhalak Prize is a testament to the range and quality of work by writers of colour in Britain, and their commitment and determination to publish and reach readers.”

The Jhalak Prize winner will be announced on 10 June 2026.